Fujikyu is turning a retired commuter train into SADEN, a day sauna sitting on the tracks at Shimoyoshida Station near Mt. Fuji. The Blue Train sleeping car that stood on the site will not be scrapped.
The crab stick in your salad or sushi roll traces back to a small town on Japan's Noto Peninsula, where it was invented as one of the country's great postwar food breakthroughs. The global surimi market is worth several billion dollars, roughly half of it crab sticks. Riding a wave of fish-eating and high-protein diets, kanikama is spreading fast, so why is Japan's surimi know-how so hard to imitate, and how is it sold abroad?
Seven & i, the owner of 7-Eleven, entered talks over a multi-billion-dollar stake in Żabka, Poland's largest convenience chain, then walked away on July 25. A look at why Europe is the gap in 7-Eleven's map, how the Polish upstart's autonomous stores and fintech already outpace many Japanese konbini, and how the deal contrasts with Seven & i's fuel-heavy US business.
Nissin launched the first-ever cold-water-only Cup Noodle on July 20. Its patented Cold Rehydrate technology turns fridge-chilled water into chewy noodles in 5 minutes. Here's how Japan, birthplace of instant ramen, keeps reinventing it.
Japan's AutoReserve sends an AI to phone restaurants on your behalf, including ones that never opted in and keep asking it to stop. It echoes Google's 2018 Duplex furor and points at an unsolved question for every AI agent, from Operator to computer use: who on the receiving end ever consented?
Toho University stroked infants on the head, back and belly. Only the back calmed them, at about 10.5 cm/s. In mouse pups raised without a mother, the response never appeared at all.
NEC and New York University estimate that flood defenses on the Rockaway Peninsula could avoid up to $800 million in losses, pricing everything from transit disruption to residents' mental health in a bid to pull private money into climate adaptation.
Japan set targets to rebuild its reactors even as its utilities keep getting caught faking data and fixing prices. How the US, France and Korea arrange nuclear oversight, and why no model is scandal-proof.
The 1910 Asakusa shop credited with inventing soy-sauce ramen and spreading the '-ken' naming culture is back. As ramen overtakes sushi with global tourists, the founder's great-great-grandson revives a legend.
Japan saw a record 36 ramen shop bankruptcies in the first half of 2026. While the world pays $18 a bowl, shops in ramen's homeland collapse against a cultural price ceiling of 1,000 yen (about $6). Here is the structural squeeze behind the paradox.
Some upright-eared Scottish Folds secretly carry the fold gene, a Japanese study finds. What this means for a painful cartilage disease and the global push to restrict fold-cat breeding.